Waiting for Godot

Abstract

Whereas Hall’s production of the English-language première in 1955 used the full original text, this one used the substantially revised script in The Beckett Notebooks, which represents Beckett’s final thoughts, and the play in its most coherent and sinuous form. The new text, which is both less ‘absurdist’ and less ‘metaphysical’, allowed a new exploration of the essential balance that has to be struck in performance between the tragic and comic, the bleakness of the language and the music hall elements.